Deborah Levy_ The Cost of Living

Deborah Levy_ The Cost of Living

 

책등에 써있는 Freer Life에 관한 개인적이고도 보편적이며 감정을 솔직하게 들여다보는 작가의 문장들이 좋았다. 섬세한 문체의 존버거와 제임스설터를 칭송하지만 그것과는 별개로 여성작가만이 낼 수 있는 목소리가 있는 듯 하다. 어느 주말에 샤를드골 공항에서 폴란드로 가는 비행기가 연착되었고, 게이트 앞에 연결된 임시 휴대폰 충전기로 충전을 해서 음악을 들으며 다급하게 마지막 페이지를 읽어내려갔다. 낯선 곳으로 향하는 최초의 출발지여서 그런지 무채색의 공항이라는 곳이 나에게는 최고의 장소이다. 아마 공항의 게이트앞 카페에서 글을 쓰게 내버려 둔다면 나같은 사람도 작가가 될 수 있을지도 모른다.

 

책등의 메시지는 이렇다.

To separate from love is to live a risk-free life. What’s the point of that sort of life? I was living in the Republic of Writing and Children. I was not Simone de Beauvoir, after all. No. I had got off the train at a different stop (marriage) and stepped on to a different platform (children). She was my muse but I was certainly not hers. Yet we had bought a ticket for head towards a freer life.

That is a vague destination, no one knows what it looks like when we get there. It is a journey without end, but I did not know that then.

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When she smiled, I knew she was making a bid to be someone braver than she felt, someone who could travel freely on her own, read a book and sip a beer alone in a bar a night, someone who could risk an impossibly complicated conversation with a stranger. p.4

 

When i was around fifty and my life was supposed to be slowing down, becoming more stable and predictable, life became faster, unstable, unpredictable. My marriage was the boat and i knew that if i swarm back to it, i would drown. It is also the ghost that will always haunt my life. I will never stop grieving for my long-held wish for enduring love that does not reduce its major players to something less than they are. I am not sure i have often witnessed love that achieves all of these things, so perhaps this achieves all of these things, so perhaps this ideal is fated to be phantom. What sort of questions does this phantom ask of me? It asks political questions for sure, but it is not a politician. p.8

 

I did not wish to restore the past. What i needed was an entirely new composition. p.20

 

I was thinking clearly, lucidly; the move up the hill and the new situation had freed something that had been trapped and stifled. I became physically strong at fifty, just as my bones were supposed to be losing their strength. I had energy because I had no choice but to have energy. I had to write to support my children and I had to do all the heavy lifting. Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs. p.22

 

On one occasion, when I was unloading the groceries in a rush, Jean suddenly appeared from behind the tree, like a scene in an Ealing comedy. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘your are always in such a hurry. Busy busy busy all the time.’ 

Jean had too much time on her hands. She was hysterically happy and i was calmly miserable. As she stood watching me lift six bags, the string of pearls I wore round my neck burst apart and fell to the ground, bouncing towards Joan’s sensible shoes. p.60

 

My new life was all about fumbling for keys in the dark.

I had a key to my mother’s house and a key for my daughter to get into her father’s flat. There was a key to Celia’s garden door that led to the writing shed and a key for the shed itself, a key to Celia’s house, a key to my electric bicycle, a key for the e-battery, a key known as a fob to get into my own building and then two keys for the front door. p.77

It had started to rain. The London pavement smelt of old coins.

 

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. 

Although they appeared to be startled, I knew they knew I was there before they turned to look. This had been my theme in Things I Don’t Want to Know, in which I speculated that the things we don’t want to know are the things that are known to us anyway, but we do not wish to look at them too closely. Freud described this wish to unknow what we know as motivated forgetting. p.109